The mental ray materials described in this section have more specialized uses than Autodesk Materials or the Arch & Design material.
Car Paint has components for a paint layer with embedded metal flakes, a clear-coat layer, and a Lambertian dirt layer.
The Matte/Shadow/Reflection material, part of the Production Shaders library, is used to create “matte objects”; that is, objects that represent real-world objects in a photograph used as the scene background (also known as the plate). The material provides a wealth of options for combining a photographic background with the 3D scene, including support for bump maps, ambient occlusion, and indirect illumination.
The mental ray material lets you create a material specifically for use by the mental ray renderer. The mental ray material has components for the surface shader, and for the other nine optional shaders that make up a material in mental ray.
The subsurface scattering (SSS) materials are intended for modeling skin and other organic materials whose appearance depends on light scattering among multiple layers. 3ds Max provides four of these materials. Each is a top-level wrapper (a “phenomenon”) for shaders whose controls are documented in the Standard mental ray Shader Libraries document. Click a link to see the mental images documentation for the shader.